Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

Islam may not be a cult, but cult-like Islam is flourishing

Islam could well be a “cult”, reckons Ron Ramsey, Republican lieutenant governor of Tennessee. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its media allies are furious. Now, generally speaking, if CAIR’s angry, that’s because someone has voiced an undiplomatic truth about Muslims. In this case I think some of Ramsey’s comments are misleading and unfair – not least to various cults, who would object to being compared to Islam. But cult-like structures are spreading within the Islamic world, and it's incredibly dangerous to pretend otherwise.

Let’s get one thing straight. Ramsey was wrong to imply that mainstream Islam isn’t a primarily a religion. It is. As such, it should enjoy the same constitutional protection as other religions, including new religious movements that we label “cults”. If Muslims, Methodists or Scientologists break the law, they should be prosecuted like anyone else. (The attempts by various European countries to introduce legal distinctions between “real religions” and “brainwashing cults” are doomed to failure, not least because no two people ever agree where the dividing line lies, and brainwashing is a bit of a myth anyway.)

My rough and ready definition of a typical cult involves a charismatic leader, radical teachings that tend to alienate adherents from their friends and families, and therefore a high degree of tension between the group and the surrounding environment. (It’s arguably this degree of tension that distinguishes cults from sects, but let’s not get into that definitional quagmire.)

Often, cult members experience psychological disorientation, and their personalities appear to change after they join the group; turnover is usually high. But some of this applies to Benedictine monasteries and the Church of England's Alpha Course, too, so let’s not get too holier-than-though about cults. Also, cult-like behaviour needn’t be overtly religious at all: think of the gurning faces of the bedsit activists trying to sell you Trotskyist newspapers on Tottenham Court road, or the Buddha-like gaze of the woman from HR as she repeats the company mantras.

There have always been cults, sects and new movements within Islam, just as there have been within Judaism and Christianity. But the fact is that, over the last 30 years, cult-like Muslim groups have been proliferating. There is a cult of Osama bin Laden, for example, both in the sense that his followers worldwide attribute quasi-magical powers to him (without knowing whether he's alive or dead, which at one point was also the case with L Rob Hubbard) and also in the sense that, at its height, Al Qaeda manipulated a network of cells that resembled, in structure at least, those found in other high-tension religious movements. I can think of, but won’t name, various Pentecostal mega-churches where preachers control the faithful through cells reporting to the centre.

Worryingly, mass immigration encourages the formation of cult-like groups within Islam. Charismatic leaders exploit the tension between young Muslim men and the wider society and make a virtue of it, as they see it, by preaching jihad. Matters aren’t helped by a surrounding milieu of street gangs, with their cult-like allegiances, and cyberspace, from which the dynamics of the cult can literally be downloaded.

But this isn’t true Islam, the great world religion, say public figures such as David Cameron, currently in Turkey holding forth on the difference between “real Islam and the distorted version of the extremists”. Our own Ed West is good on this:

Cameron is falling into exactly the same trap as his predecessors, by trying to play the theologian. Tony Blair called the Koran a “progressive” book, Jacqui Smith called Islamic terrorism “anti-Islamic” activities, while the phrase “religion of peace” has been used so often by well-meaning politicians that it is now used exclusively in an ironic sense by cynics.

Who on earth is Cameron to say what is the real Islam? If a fresh-faced politician from the Islamic world told us that the fundamentalist Christians who funded settlements in the West Bank because they believed in some crazy end times were not “real Christians”, I’d be flattered that he recognised differences within a large and wide ranging religion, but I’d also think “Who are you to say?”

It’s interesting to compare Dave’s confident judgments with those of Ron Ramsey. This is what the latter said:

Now, you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult whatever you want to call it … Certainly we do protect our religions but at the same time this is something we are going to have to face.

Now, you know, I'm all about freedom of religion. I value the First Amendment as much as I value the Second Amendment as much as I value the Tenth Amendment and on and on and on.

But you cross the line when they try to start bringing Sharia Law here to the state of Tennessee, to the United States. We live under our Constitution and they live under our Constitution.

Ramsey is floating some bad ideas here, such as the notion that being a Muslim means belonging to a cult, but he’s being more honest than Cameron when he recognises that there’s real confusion about what Islam is and how it is changing. Yes, it’s primarily a religion, followed peacefully by hundreds of millions of people (which isn’t to say that it’s best described as the Religion of Peace). But the aggressive drive among the Muslim diaspora to extend Sharia reinforces the cult-like impulses of young Muslims who are busy separating themselves from the rest of the world – often including their own families, whose lack of enthusiasm for Sharia, in their opinion, places them outside "real Islam".

As I say, it’s wrong, even outrageous, to suggest limiting the constitutional rights of Muslims simply because they’re Muslims. But I don’t see that happening, either in the US or in Britain. What I do see is a religion unable to contain its sectarian extremists, which increasingly shares with them a desire to limit its own members’ constitutional rights in the name of Sharia. Oh, but that will never happen in Tennessee, say Ramsey’s critics. They are probably right. But I bet people once said that about Bradford.